Milk Tray Men on zipwires; huskies and waltzing polar bears: Gamme Rouge's last-season show was one of the most entertaining on the schedule. What it lacked, though, were many compellingly wearable clothes: all that fur-trimmed, crystal encrusted Narnia skiwear was a tough call - even for Meribel.

Related articles

This season, however, Gamme Rouge got everything right. First of all, it was within a smidgen of being as engagingly eccentric as the last show. The finale featured blokes in gorilla suits - who doesn't a love gorilla suit? - skating down the creeper-bisected catwalk.

Photo: AP

During the show street-kids on skateboards carved that catwalk too, and there were male models carrying basketballs and hoisting Moncler backpacks, who were often gym-ripped and shirtless.

From my spot in the second row I could see that this went down
extremely
with many prominent female magazine editors - there were many Men's Health-y torso tweets and Instagrams emanating from their Smartphones.

Photos: Isidore Montag

Recreational objectification aside, where this Moncler show really scored was where it matters most: the clothes. This was sports-inspired streetwear haute-d up through its materials and construction, but only rarely made too fiddly to wear. Jungle prints deployed on urban garments included snake and tigerprint, plus a grid of lines that resembled the cracked mud of a dried waterhole. Hoodie-dresses were sometimes peppered with feathers (this was a Paris show, after all) but most of it was ready to wear. Particularly good was a panelled dress that came khaki shouldered, leopard-print at the midsection, then skirted with a flash of high-visibility orange. The menswear, although an aside here, was amongst the best from Moncler I've seen.

This Italian jacket brand already has the connections - Pharrell Williams wears Moncler, and sometimes-designs for it too - to be a big deal brand for urban twentysomethings. This collection showed its clothes are perfectly pitched too.